Windows 8 vaults past Vista, IE10 continues to surge

One in twenty now use Microsoft's flagship operating system.

Windows 8 passed a milestone of sorts in June, passing Windows Vista's market share to become the third most-used version of Windows on the Internet. Internet Explorer 10 continued to show strong growth too, fueled this time by automatic updating.

Google Chrome put in a strong performance, offsetting losses made earlier in the year. Its growth was to the detriment of Mozilla's Firefox, which fell significantly.

Microsoft's browser made a slight gain, up 0.16 points to 56.15 percent (a two year high). Firefox was down 1.48 points to 19.15 percent—the lowest share the open source browser has seen for more than two years. Chrome rose 1.43 points to a 17.17 percent share. Safari was more or less unchanged, up 0.09 points to 5.55 percent. Opera lost 0.19 points for a share of 1.58 percent, a level not seen since August last year.

Part of this swing is likely due to a change in how our data source, Net Market Share, counts traffic. Net Market Share has long had a policy of excluding pages that Chrome speculatively loads and renders but does not show to users. In June, it also started excluding pages that load in background tabs but are never subsequently viewed. This category included 6.38 percent of Firefox traffic, 6.33 percent of Opera traffic, 5.60 percent of Chrome traffic, 0.70 percent of Internet Explorer traffic, and 0.15 percent of Safari traffic.

This suggests that users of Firefox, Chrome, and Opera tend to have more tabs open than users of Internet Explorer and Safari. Further, these users likely have a bunch of tabs that persist from session to session but are not consistently viewed. Internet Explorer and Safari users, by contrast, appear to have fewer tabs but actually read almost all the tabs that they open.

In the mobile world, we're seeing the usual fluctuations. Safari was down 1.94 points to 58.04 percent; Android browser was down 0.15 points to 20.58 percent. Opera Mini, however, picked up 0.63 points for an 11.16 percent share.

Three browsers are showing some more consistent trends. Internet Explorer gained for the third month running, up 0.4 points to 2.37 percent. Chrome was up for the fifth month running, up 0.53 points to 3.75 percent. Opera Mobile fell for the fifth month in a row, down 0.09 points to 0.31 percent.

The implication here is that both "modern" Android (those versions that can run or, in particular, ship with Chrome as the default) and Windows Phone are starting to become a more significant presence on the Web.

The upgrade story is the same as always, with adoption of Internet Explorer 10 continuing to outpace the adoption of previous Internet Explorer versions. In June, IE posted its biggest gains yet, up 4.28 points for a total of 13.57 percent of the desktop Web. As with previous months, this came at the expense of Internet Explorer 9, which dropped 3.67 points to 11.72 percent during the same period.

Windows 8 also had a good month. The operating system overtook Windows Vista, up 0.83 points for a 5.10 percent market share. This, in fact, marks the biggest one-month gain since the operating system went on sale. It also puts Microsoft's platform ahead of the two most recent versions of OS X.

98 Reader Comments

Oh wow, looks like Mobile IE is finally big enough to no longer be placed under "Other." Also, I'm glad you explained the difference in marketshare reporting, because I was wondering what the hell caused Firefox's huge drop in marketshare.

Mozilla needs to find a way to get all of those people running anything but the ESR or release versions of Firefox up to date (that is, everyone running anything but 17 or 22), especially those retards running <10. I'm half convinced that they're the ones that actively discourage other people from trying FF by running a massively out of date version then bitching about speed and memory usage issues.

Mozilla needs to find a way to get all of those people running anything but the ESR or release versions of Firefox up to date (that is, everyone running anything but 17 or 22), especially those retards running <10. (emphasis added)

Really? I'm a retard? ;O)

No problem, I'm sure I could find a dozen reasons to make the same retarded claim of you. ;-P

Do you actually have a valid reason to not be updating? I haven't heard one before so I'm quite curious.

Mozilla needs to find a way to get all of those people running anything but the ESR or release versions of Firefox up to date (that is, everyone running anything but 17 or 22), especially those retards running <10.

They know the way to get us to upgrade. Give us the interface we had in 3.6!

Where is the author getting this data from? Almost everywhere I have checked, including on wiki (which puts together most of the major ones and compares them) utterly go against the information that is shown here, its not even close. Is he only using one source, or is just visits to ARS itself? Everything I found says Chrome is either around 50 % some say lower, but never was it lower than IE.

This comes up each time, there are 2 sets of market share stats. This one from Net Market Share counts unique users, the other one counts page views. Chrome users just view a lot more pages then any other user (although some say its due to Chrome's pre-fetch, but the group collecting the data say they account for that)

Really comes down to which stat you feel is more valid

Number of actual people who use a particular browserorNumber of pages loaded by a particular browser (which could theoretically be 1 guy, a bot, and the worlds greatest internet connection visiting every page on the interwebs

I don't know how many people are in the same boat as me but I'm an extremely fickle mobile browser user. Nothing seems to be what I want. I used UC browser and loved its navigation but it was very buggy, I'm currently on Dolphin but I'd prefer something with swipe to go back rather than go to gesture and draw an arrow (I know I'm pedantic).

I feel there is a big area here someone can capitalise on if they get a good browser for mobile phones at the moment everything seems too desktop based and not tailored enough for phones.

Wow, you must not read any discussion of Firefox at all. A primary reason people don't update is extensions break on newer versions.

If you're using an extension that breaks when the Release channel updates, you should find a replacement because the author is obviously not maintaining it. All changes go Nightly -> Aurora -> Beta -> Release, with several months between each transition. Extension authors have plenty of time and exposure to fix things before the browser changes hit Release.

Interesting. Slightly unrelated, but what is the Ars' users' browser distribution? Here is mine for the last 4 hours (typical), which does not reflect the market distribution (to say the least):

I have to say that I only go to your site with Firefox and almost all scripts turned off, just because of the massive amount of extra stuff that is there. That isn't to say I don't like your site or support what you do (both my wife and I do), but it is a painful site to load without turning off the scripts.

Mozilla needs to find a way to get all of those people running anything but the ESR or release versions of Firefox up to date (that is, everyone running anything but 17 or 22), especially those retards running <10.

They know the way to get us to upgrade. Give us the interface we had in 3.6!

And just to rub it in:

edit: I didn't want to be dickish about it, but the people who are using 2+ year old versions of Firefox are no better than the people who use IE6, and you hold back the progress and security of the internet in exactly the same way. Please, please, please upgrade, even if it's just to the FF17 ESR.

Wow, you must not read any discussion of Firefox at all. A primary reason people don't update is extensions break on newer versions.

If you're using an extension that breaks when the Release channel updates, you should find a replacement because the author is obviously not maintaining it. All changes go Nightly -> Aurora -> Beta -> Release, with several months between each transition. Extension authors have plenty of time and exposure to fix things before the browser changes hit Release.

Yeah, there's 18 weeks between Nightly and Release, that's 4 1/2 months. If the extension author isn't bothering to maintain the extension over that period then it isn't worth it. And that goes completely beyond the fact that Moz will auto-increment every extension in the repository unless it actually tests as broken.

Mozilla needs to find a way to get all of those people running anything but the ESR or release versions of Firefox up to date (that is, everyone running anything but 17 or 22), especially those retards running <10.

They know the way to get us to upgrade. Give us the interface we had in 3.6!

Firefox 3.6 reached End of Life in April 2012. You're really sticking with a 3.5 year old browser that hasn't had a security patch in over 15 months because of the UI?

Interesting. Slightly unrelated, but what is the Ars' users' browser distribution? Here is mine for the last 4 hours (typical), which does not reflect the market distribution (to say the least):

I have to say that I only go to your site with Firefox and almost all scripts turned off, just because of the massive amount of extra stuff that is there. That isn't to say I don't like your site or support what you do (both my wife and I do), but it is a painful site to load without turning off the scripts.

I'm aware about it and I'm going to do something about it in a radical way (meaning moving to my own's hosting and making it lighter). When I have a chance...

Yah I believe those stats as far as I can throw MS's main campus. A friend had 8 on his system....gave him a home premium license. Two more of my relatives got 8 laptops. I put 7 on it. And I know I'm not the only one to do this. Just because MS force fed this crap down people's throats doesn't mean they aren't barfing it back up. Or at least a good % of them.

These numbers are not based on sales. They're based on usage. So the 0.83 increase is real, in spite of your best efforts to stop it. lol

Mozilla needs to find a way to get all of those people running anything but the ESR or release versions of Firefox up to date (that is, everyone running anything but 17 or 22), especially those retards running <10. I'm half convinced that they're the ones that actively discourage other people from trying FF by running a massively out of date version then bitching about speed and memory usage issues.

The only version of Firefox I use is 3.6. I have it installed on one machine and use it for the sole purpose of accessing my router's web management interface. Newer browsers refuse to display it due to certificate issues. Of course, it'll never show up in usage statistics.

Mozilla needs to find a way to get all of those people running anything but the ESR or release versions of Firefox up to date (that is, everyone running anything but 17 or 22), especially those retards running <10. I'm half convinced that they're the ones that actively discourage other people from trying FF by running a massively out of date version then bitching about speed and memory usage issues.

The only version of Firefox I use is 3.6. I have it installed on one machine and use it for the sole purpose of accessing my router's web management interface. Newer browsers refuse to display it due to certificate issues. Of course, it'll never show up in usage statistics.

Mozilla needs to find a way to get all of those people running anything but the ESR or release versions of Firefox up to date (that is, everyone running anything but 17 or 22), especially those retards running <10. (emphasis added)

Really? I'm a retard? ;O)

No problem, I'm sure I could find a dozen reasons to make the same retarded claim of you. ;-P

If you are using an old version of a browser by choice then you have to be either lazy or retarded - there's no valid reason to run an old browser (err, other than for testing, I have about a dozen browser versions installed) if you have a choice. Absolutely zero. Every "reason" given in the comments for this article have been pointed out to be flawed. I basically have to support IE8 because Windows XP (although I dont't worry too much about stuff looking nice on IE8, I only care if it works), but if you run an out-of-date version of Chrome or FF (other than the ESR which is 17.0 atm), then I'm not going to support you (I do testing in some old versions, but I don't really care if those people lose functionality, just that if they do they know it's because they need to update their browser).

Why? Because fuck you, that's why. I have the same attituted to you that you have to me, deal with it.

Great info if you're a multi-national corporation... sigh... the rest of us, not so much....

Once again... only useless worldwide stats. Show the stats on the USA someday?

Why would I want the stats for a single foreign country like the USA? I'm not a multi-national corporation, just someone from outside the US who reads Ars. Internet doesn't have borders, and Ars delivers the same content regardless of country.